BHUBANESWAR  SUNDAY  MAY 18, 2025  `12.00  PAGES 26  LATE CITY EDITION CBSE ASKS SCHOOLS TO SET UP ‘SUGAR BOARDS’ TO CHECK INTAKE The CBSE has directed affiliated schools to establish “sugar boards” to monitor and reduce sugar intake of children, according to officials MOVE FOLLOWS RISE IN TYPE 2 DIABETES IN KIDS The move follows a significant increase in Type 2 diabetes among kids, a condition once primarily seen in adults, over the past decade. Several studies indicate that sugar constitutes 13 per cent of daily calorie intake for children aged four to 10 years, and 15 per cent for those aged 11 to 18 years, substantially exceeding the recommended limit of 5 per cent 13% SUGARY SNACKS, PROCESSED FOODS CULPRITS ■ “The proliferation of sugary snacks, beverages, and processed foods, often readily available in school environments, contributes significantly to this excessive intake,” CBSE said in a circular ■ The direction was issued after a nudge by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to ensure kids are safe from diabetes OF DAILY CALORIE INTAKE AMONG CHILDREN COMES FROM SUGAR CHENNAI ■ MADURAI ■ VIJAYAWADA ■ BENGALURU ■ KOCHI ■ HYDERABAD ■ VISAKHAPATNAM ■ COIMBATORE ■ KOZHIKODE ■ THIRUVANANTHAPURAM ■ BELAGAVI ■ BHUBANESWAR ■ SHIVAMOGGA ■ MANGALURU ■ TIRUPATI ■ TIRUCHY ■ TIRUNELVELI ■ SAMBALPUR ■ HUBBALLI ■ DHARMAPURI ■ KOTTAYAM ■ KANNUR ■ VILLUPURAM ■ KOLLAM ■ TADEPALLIGUDEM ■ NAGAPATTINAM ■ THRISSUR ■ KALABURAGI Tharoor on govt’s global India turns the outreach team, Cong sore screws on imports TIT-FOR-TAT DIPLOMACY Wasn’t recommended by party; govt names 7 heads of delegations WILL NOT BE FOUND WANTING: CONG MP P R E E T H A N A I R @ New Delhi ‘Spy’ YouTuber Jyoti had been to Puri last year A S I S H M E H TA @ Bhubaneswar ODISHA Police have launched an inquiry into the Puri visit of Haryana-based YouTuber Jyoti Malhotra, who was arrested on Saturday on charges of spying for Pakistan. After her arrest, a video of Malhotra’s visit to Shree Jagannath Temple in Puri, which she had shared on her Instagram account, went viral. She had also uploaded her pictures at the Puri sea beach on Instagram. As the videos surfaced, Puri police swung into action and launched an inquiry They have . received information that Malhotra has a friend in Puri and are verifying the claims. “We received some videos of Malhotra which she had reportedly recorded during her visit to Puri last year and shared them on her social media account. A detailed inquiry has been launched to find out if she knows anyone in Puri, if she received any assistance for her visit and the places she went to during her stay,” said Puri SP, Vinit Agrawal. Malhotra enjoys huge following on YouTube and Instagram and posted several videos of her visit to the neighbouring country earlier this year. She was apprehended for allegedly sharing sensitive information with Pakistani agents. VLOGGER FROM HARYANA HELD FOR SPYING Jyoti Malhotra, who runs a YouTube channel ‘Travel with JO’ was allegedly in contact with a Pakistani staffer working at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi | P10 THE rift between the Congress leadership and Shashi Tharoor deepened on Saturday after the Centre picked him to lead one of the seven multi-party delegations for its diplomatic outreach against Pakistan’s crossborder terror despite the party not recommending his name. Apart from Tharoor, BJP MPs Ravi Shankar Prasad and Baijayant Panda, JD(U)’s Sanjay Jha, DMK’s Kanimozhi, NCP (SP)’s Supriya Sule, and Shiv Sena’s Shrikant Shinde will head the other delegations. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said the party had submitted four names for the mission and was surprised to see ‘a different name’, Shashi Tharoor, in the official list. The party had suggested the names of Anand Sharma, Gaurav Gogoi, Syed Naseer Hussain and Amrinder Singh Raja Warring for the delegations. Significantly, the party distanced itself from Tharoor’s comments endorsing the Modi government’s handling of the India-Pak conflict and US President Trump’s intervention in announcing the ceasefire. “I am honoured by the invitation to lead an all-party delegation to five key capitals, to present our nation’s point of view on recent events... When national interest is involved, and my services are required, I will not be found wanting. Jai Hind!” Tharoor said “We were asked for names. We expected that the names we had given would be included. But when we saw the press release of PIB, we were surprised. I cannot say what will happen now. Asking four names, giving four names, and announcing another name is dishonest on t h e g ove r n m e n t ’s p a r t , ” Ramesh told the media. “The government cannot include names of MPs in delegations without consulting the party he said. ,” This paper reported on Saturday that the PMO had prepared the list of names and conveyed them to the respective political parties. When asked about Tharoor’s inclusion as a representative of the Congress in the list, Ramesh said that ‘there is a difference between being in the Congress and being of the Congress’. “In a democratic system, when individual MPs are sent as part of an official delegation, MPs must seek the concurrence of the party. If the government wants to send him as part of a delegation, the MP should be asking the party, he said. “The ball is in the government’s court now,” he added. Accusing the government of being ‘dishonest’ in its approach, the leader asserted that the party would not change the four proposed names for the delegation. Ramesh added that Rahul Gandhi has written to Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju on this. P9 from Bangladesh D I PA K M O N D A L @ New Delhi IN what seems like another ‘retaliatory’ move, the Indian government has imposed restrictions on imports of certain goods from its eastern neighbour Bangladesh. In a directive issued on Saturday by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the import of all kinds of readymade gar ments from Bangladesh through land ports has been prohibited. These goods will only be allowed to be imported through the seaports of Nhava Sheva and Kolkata. A wider range of goods— including fruit and fruit-flavoured carbonated drinks, processed food items, cotton and cotton yarn waste, plastic and PVC finished goods (excluding essential industrial inputs such as pigments, dyes, plasticisers, and granules), and wooden furniture — will face more Finishing trial in just 55 days, J’guda court convicts man for sexual assault of minor boys one of the victims, had reported that her 11-year-old son was @ Sambalpur/Jharsuguda sexually assaulted by the accused on the evening of March A Jharsuguda POCSO court 21. The boy was lured to an completed trial and convicted a abandoned building in Haltan25-year-old youth charged with ki of Brajrajnagar on Nag’s sexual assault of two minor motorcycle where he was sexuboys within 55 days of registra- ally assaulted. When he resisttion of the FIR, thereby notch- ed, Nag allegedly assaulted ing up a record of sorts in him and threatened to justice delivery . strangle him to death. Pronouncing the verThe complainant dict, Additional Disfurther revealed that trict and Sessions Nag had sexually asCourt-cum-Special saulted her son multiPOCSO Court judge ple times in the past Puja Sarangi on Saturand also harassed her day held Ajit Nag ne phew and other guilty and sentenced boys from the locality . him to 25 years of rig- The conviction of The accused had preorous imprisonment. viously served jail a repeat sexual The court awarded a time for a similar predator in record time not fine of `10,000 on Nag, offence. only reinforces and an additional six Nag was apprehendpublic trust in months in jail if the ed on March 27, just the justice fine remained unpaid. four days after the FIR system but also The court examined 27 was lodged and Jharsets a model for witnesses and re- child protection suguda police submitviewed 62 documents ted chargesheet withSmit P Parmar, SP before convicting Nag in 16 days, on April 8. for multiple offences. Jharsuguda SP Smit The case was registered at P Parmar, who was supervisoBrajrajnagar police station un- ry officer of the case, said, d e r s e c t i o n s 1 3 7 ( 1 ) both the victim boys were (b)/115(2)/351(2) BNS r/w 6 awarded `8 lakh each as comPOCSO Act on March 23 this pensation by the court under year. the Victim Compensation CONTINUED ON P7 The complainant, mother of Scheme. @ Ahmedabad A `71-crore scam under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been unearthed in Gujarat, implicating the family of state panchayat and agriculture minister Bachu Khabad. His elder son, Balwant Khabad, has been arrested, while his younger son, Kiran Khabad, is under scrutiny . The scam surfaced after B M Patel, director of DRDA, flagged ir re gularities in project execution in Devgadh Baria and Dhanpur taluks. The scam involved fake infrastructure projects, with funds meant for tribal employment siphoned off to agencies linked Gujarat minister to the minis- Bachu Khabad ter’s sons through fabricated invoices. An audit revealed that Raj Construction and Raj Traders, run by Balwant and Kiran Khabad, were involved in the fraud. Between 2021 and 2025, villages like Kuva, Redhana, and Simamoi were falsely marked as beneficiaries of completed MGNREGA projects. On the ground, there was little to no work—only forged completion reports and a trail of diverted payments. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been formed. The minister did not respond to questions from this newspaper. WITH THIS ISSUE mon at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. But a lot of the ticketholders had turned a Red wall into a lot of White as they paid tribute to the man who has called this ground home for more than two months every year since 2008. In many ways, Saturday was significant even before Kohli’s sudden announcement. For starters, it marked the resumption of the Indian Premier League after an eight-day break following the escalation of hostilities between India and Paki- PLUS 12 PAGES Workers tend to the flower plantations at Hatiasuni roundabout, in Bhubaneswar on Saturday | DEBADATTA MALLICK Paddy stockpile: Govt urges FCI to speed up rice offtake B I J O Y P R A D H A N @ Bhubaneswar THE record procurement of 73.5 lakh tonne paddy during the kharif season has posed a problem of plenty for the state forcing the government to send an SOS to the Centre to evacuate more custom-milled rice from Odisha to the central pool. While the storage capacity of rice millers, registered with the Odisha State Civil Supplies Corporation (OSCSC) for milling and delivery of custommilled rice (CMR) to the state government and Food Corporation of India (FCI), is full to the brim, procurement of rabi paddy from May 15 has added to the woes. Sitting over a stockpile of over 48.5 lakh tonne of paddy (equivalent of 33 lakh tonne rice) after delivery of 16.25 lakh tonne of CMR rice to the state and FCI, the All Odisha Rice Millers Association (AORMA) has taken up the matter with the Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (FS&CW) department to put pressure on FCI to speed up evacuation of rice. Even as FCI has fixed a target to lift 1.7 lakh tonne of CMR rice from the state every month, the central public sector undertaking is evacuating far less due to shortage of storage space in its godowns. The central agency has received 7.76 lakh tonne of CMR rice for kharif 2024-25 season from the state as on May 7, 2025, against the target of 10.20 lakh tonne, sources said. The state government has procured 73.5 lakh tonne during the current marketing season which will be equivalent to 49.6 lakh tonne rice. The annual consumption of Odisha under national and state food security prog rammes and supplementary nutrition programme is around 23 lakh tonne, leaving a surplus of 26 lakh tonne. Moreover, the state is expected to procure 10 lakh tonne rice during the ongoing rabi procurement taking the total surplus to 36 lakh CONTINUED ON P7 tonne. EXPRESS READ PHOTO: VINOD KUMAR T stan. For the fans, however, it was about giving their cricketing hero a fitting on-field trib- Sultan of Subversion BLOOMING AFFAIR Men in Whites dwarf Red and Gold at Chinnaswamy IT had been brewing since Virat Kohli announced his retirement from Tests last Monday. What started as a social media campaign on Tuesday hours af, ter Kohli’s social media post, became a reality on Saturday as thousands of fans came dressed wearing Kohli’s replica Test jersey . “Virat,” the back of the white jersey read “18”. There were some pockets with a lot of Red and Gold, something very com- D I L I P S I N G H K S H AT R I YA M AYA N K B H U S A N PA N I / RAJ KUMAR SHARMA KOHLI TRIBUTE G O M E S H S @ Bengaluru stringent port restrictions. These items will not be allowed entry through northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. The restriction also extends to Changrabandha and Fulbari in West Bengal. However, the DGFT clarified that these restrictions do not apply to essential imports such as fish, LPG, edible oil, and crushed stone. The DGFT notification clarified that these port restrictions would not be applicable to Bangladeshi goods transiting through India but destined for Nepal and Bhutan. Though the government has not disclosed the reasons for the move, it is likely that it came in the wake of Bangladesh restricting land imports of cotton yarn from India to protect local industries from cheaper imports. India’s total annual trade with Bangladesh is around $13 billion. Guj minister’s son held for `71-cr scam ute. It did not matter that this wasn’t even an international game. Kohli, as many fans out- side the stadium put it, was, is and will be an emotion to them. They wanted to give a fitting salute to their beloved star. Some fans, when they realised they would not be getting the tickets, decided to shell out money from their own pockets to print white replica jerseys in the name of Kohli and sell them outside the ground. Talamika, an IT professional, said: “We wanted to give a tribute to Kohli. We couldn’t get tickets that is why we are selling the jerseys.” CJI to preside vacation bench sittings New Delhi: Chief Justice of India BR Gavai has put a stop to the practice that senior judges, including the CJI, are not supposed to hold court hearings during summer vacation. The Supreme Court has issued a notification on the benches that will function during the summer vacation from May 26 to July 13. The CJI has also decided that he would conduct court proceedings from May 26 to June 1. The regular functioning of the court will resume from July 14 | P9 ‘Putin-Zelenskyy meet only after deal’ Kyiv: The Kremlin on Saturday said a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be possible only after both sides reach a deal, a day after Moscow and Kyiv held their first direct talks, which did not result in a truce. Kremlin said both sides need to present their visions for a ceasefire before the next round of talks | P11